Take A Look At Solaris 10

SilentBob4 writes "There haven't been many reviews of the recent Solaris 10 release from Sun Microsytems, and even those which are available are thin at best... until now. Mad Penguin, normally a Linux-only site, has release the most comprehensive and well-written review of the OS to date."

Is solaris still used often?

[stuffedmonkey]

I am wondering, not to troll, but what kinds of uses does Solaris still find itself filling?

Re:releasing source code

[REBloomfield]

Or just maybe they're concentrating on their hardware like Apple do?

While the hell does every company nowadays have to release source code just to be accepted by you guys? Sun have been doing their thing, and doing it well, for years. They don't need to pander to you Open Source hippies in order to succeed.

Well-written?

[henrik]

Not sure I would classify this as well-written considering the author seems to have no idea of Solaris legacy nor why for example directory hierarchy is as it is. Seems like the normal uninformed Linux-is-the-real-Unix review.

Before you declare them "dead"...

[davejenkins]

While I wager most of the responses on this thread will be some variant on "so what, Solaris is dead", let me say that I met with a senior planner of a very large system integrator here in APAC, and he pretty much said the opposite: Solaris 10 will fill all their needs and that the whole Linux/penguin/RMS-sideshow was a distraction at this point.

Sun has spent years playing in the biggest game with the biggest boys. Their gross holdings dwarf that of Red Hat and Novell. Solaris 10 has all the core functionality that the major major banks and conservative institutions want. Sun has dedicated salespeople who know these clients for years now. Do not count them out, yet.

Sure, Solaris 10 seems like a Hail Mary, but think why the Hail Mary play is there: it works sometimes...

Solaris 10 runs my router

[Dancin_Santa]

They don't go into it in the article, but Solaris has slowly begun more and more modular (kind of like NetBSD without all that pesky hardware support).

So much so, in fact, that I have several stripped down versions running as various embedded "smart" devices around the office. One is obviously the router, but others include a firewall, file server, and PBX. The best hack I've done so far with this is the Solaris 10 Roomba, but the battery life is really bad.

Solaris is great on the server, but don't discount its abilities on the small platforms!

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[BlueUnderwear]

but what kinds of uses does Solaris still find itself filling?

I recently installed Solaris on my 2 Laptops. Reason: testing Solaris compatibility of software that I maintain! ;-)

It has been an interesting experience anyways, because I ended up not only testing (and fixing...) my own software, but also testing Solaris' usability (or rather: lack thereof...):

• Very fragile install process (pop in the wrong CD just once, and start over from scratch...)
• Refuses to create a Solaris partition if a Linux Swap partition is present (... because both share the same partition id 82, but other OS'es at least give you the option of "ignore this partition, and create a new one instead!"
• Poor dependancy management in the installer (the Solaris installer does flag broken dependancies, but unlike most Linux distros does not have a button to "resolve" these automatically)
• No straightforward way to configure a Swiss-German keyboard
• On one of my two laptops, X Display was all messed up after install. Fortunately, there was still an xf86config-like script lying around.
• poor hardware support (on both laptops, I had to download extra drivers from the net to get Ethernet... and the only way to get these drivers on the Laptop in the first place was to burn a CD.... One of the two Ethernet cards was a via-rhine, not exactly uncommon hardware!)
• Unobvious paths for some sundry utils /usr/ccs/bin/make, /usr/sfw/bin/gcc. Find is your friend, but locate has left you stranded...

Re:Before you declare them "dead"...

[luvirini]

Indeed, one of the problems sun has is that their system and computers are "too good". A customer of ours is still running their heavily used website on a SUN from 1999. They have no plans to upgrade. Thus no need to buy new servers like you would on other types.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Who said it was unpatched?

[Anonymous Coward]

And just why do you think you have to develop apps on boxes that old to run on boxes that old? Your experience with unstable operating system interfaces or monopoly pressure to upgrade?

With Solaris, as long as you're not running device drivers or going out into the esoteric reaches of POSIX conformance, you can write an app on Solaris 10 and watch it run on Solaris 2.5.

If all you're doing is running Apache, close all your ports, keep Apache patched, and you'll be secure.

I do wonder if they've closed off the syslog UDP port, though. You can fill up their root disk (or where ever they've put /var/adm/messages) if they haven't...

Re:releasing source code

[quigonn]

FUD, FUD, FUD. Linux so far scales to up to 256 CPUs on real computers (SGI Altix 3700, single node), while Solaris hasn't scaled to more than 106 CPUs on real computers (Sun Fire 15K).

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[FatherOfONe]

I am not trying to be a jerk, but how much memory did you add before you had to recompile your kernel?

Do you run RH ES 3.0? Would that also be a problem with it?

I run SuSE and have been up to 4GiG and haven't had a problem, and the motherboard offers up to 24GB or RAM support (Duel AMD Opteron with 64bit SuSE).

Thanks!

More drivel

[nemaispuke]

I read this "review" when it showed up on OSNews and thought "yet another Linux/BSD/whatever user attempts to use Solaris and fails". Everybody seems to focus on what Sun is pimping (DTrace, Zones, Predictive Self Healing), what about actually using the OS?

I have been using (and beta testing) Solaris 10 since August 2003, and there is a lot more to it than DTrace, Zones, and Predictive Self Healing. There are several password security improvements, a new installation metacluster (Reduced Networking Support), a new installation method (WAN Boot), the ability to wrap RPC connections so that connections get logged (TCP Wrappers). And so you don't have to download a ton of software, GCC, gmake, webmin, GIMP, and other tools are part of the Full Distribution installation.

The problem with "reviews" is trying to meet the insaitable demand for "information" and not actually providing anything other than a rehash of publicity materials. How about everybody being paitient and hold off for a "quality" review.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every single Govt. RFP (request for proposal) I've seen this year had the boilerplate requiring Solaris compatibility replaced with a complex paragraph saying that Solaris and/or Linux compatibility was required but if it wasn't already Linux compatible, a planned migration path to Linux _must_ be provided.

With EAL4 certification for Linux, the handwriting is on the wall, I think.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[aaamr]

It was an upgrade from 2GB to 4GB, and the installed kernel did not have large mem support compiled in. Just one of the steps that was overlooked in the process. If I recall, only 3.5GB was recognized before the new kernel was installed.

You are missing the point.

[jotaeleemeese]

WHen Solaris works (most of the time) it does very well.

When it does not, you are almost on your own, no matter how much you are paying for support (you would be surpirsed what companies like Sun can get away with, even when dealing with big clients).

With Linux, if the company providing support is ignoring you, you can try to solve the problem yourself (which is achievable in many cases) or ask somebody else to fix the problem.

With Sun you are lost if your problem is not one of their priorities.

Solaris Noob

[Zontar The Mindless]

First of all, I'm no Solaris expert. (Heck, I only switched from Windows to Linux full-time a month or two ago.) But I was curious, and thought it might be cool to run our main product on Sol-x86 along with the Linux and win32 versions.

I figured I'd be filling up an otherwise uneventful weekend, so I threw together a 433/256 out of spare parts, downloaded and burned the ISOs, and made myself a large pot of coffee. The installation took about 2 hours and pretty much everything I needed worked right the first time, and now I've got myself a nifty little SAMP server for testing. (Running Solaris 10, Apache 1.3.31, PHP 5.0.3, and MySQL 5.0.2-alpha.)

Reviewer missed a lot..

[Loconut1389]

Solaris zones are way cooler than one paragraph could explain- you can take a zone and move it to a duplicately configured machine (ala flash install or otherwise) in a heartbeat.. among other things..

the reviewer had trouble installing without rebooting part-way through.. the way it sounded, he could only install the mini root and then reboot.. I just did a solaris 10 install friday on a Sun V480 box and not only did it install all 4 cds before rebooting into the actual OS, I did all of the package selection at the beginning and didn't have to wait for anything - magic of DVDs! In any case, i'm still pretty sure that you can do the package selection in front without having to twiddle thumbs between cds (eg package selection is not on a per cd basis)..

Those were just a couple problems with the review I saw.. I don't think they really know solaris well enough to be reviewing it and have it considered worth much.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Listen Up]

You are complaining about the x86 version of Solaris. Hardware problems are non-existent on the Sparc platform. And you are complaining about features that have NOTHING to do with Enterprise Server computing. USB keyfob? WTF? If you want Linux, then install Linux. Linux is slowly reaching perfection one day at a time. But, if you want almost limitless power, scalability, reliability, and security on huge SMP systems and distributed networks today then you choose an OS like Solaris. If you are someone looking to use Solaris to play MP3 files then you have no idea what you are doing.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[dknj]

well played troll... i'll bite.

I am going to assume you don't use solaris on a daily basis. If you think solaris is going to work like a redheaded stepchild, you are wrong. you seemed to have come across a bug in the installer, which didn't instruct vold to eject the cd. Because of this, the cdrom drive will remain locked by the volume manager. Forcefully changing the cd will not change anything because the drive never opened, according to vold. I would frequently find solaris machines with nonfunctioning cdrom drives in our datacenter because others that have no solaris experience would paperclip the cdrom drive to get their cds back. Very annoying.

next, don't trust solaris x86 on any hardware that doesn't say sun on the outside. simple as that. solaris is not what is special, its moreso the hardware it runs on and the sparc platform is what solaris is tuned for. yes, x86 may be supported but they don't support every single device created by man.

pkgadd does not ignore -d. get over it.

the install process will also drop you to a text-mode installer if your video card is not supported (a minor problem on our ultra 10s) or don't have a mouse setup. on that note, to fix your X display problem, try disabling it (if you can't figure out how, solaris is definitely not for you yet)

Look at what google turns up about your usb storage device [google.com]

When you try a new OS, you have to get rid of the mentality you're used to. Solaris != Linux, therefore "features" that you normally expect aren't there because the path Solaris takes is different than other OS'. Solaris x86 is basically a direct port from sparc which means, there generally aren't other OS's using the same partition id. Maybe Sun could update the installer, but they didn't. Deal with it. Install everything+oem and lock down the machine with jass, or know what you are doing before you start picking and choosing your packages. Finally, the paths are as they are for historical reasons as well. Solaris didn't always have gcc, they have a much better compiler. GCC was added to the companion cd later since it was publicly available on many sun freeware sites. All non-sun software goes to /usr/sfw.

Welcome to Solaris, if you don't like it, leave and keep preaching for -insert your favorite os here-. If you want to actually do something productive with Solaris, harness it's real power. Like Zones, ZFS, SMF, etc. Quit bitching about how it doesn't perform like Linux.

-dk
btw, to revive a zombie cdrom drive, stop vold, eject the cd manually (using the button on the cd/dvd drive), start vold

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[BlueUnderwear]

[keyfobs] In theory, I don't think you should have to mount those at all.

Hmm, this sounds interesting, never did actually try...

Tried it, there was indeed a /dev/usb/mass-storage0 entry that appeared as soon as I inserted my SanDisk cruzer, but nothing was mounted (... nor was that device node readable).

After a bit of googling around, I came accross the following post: Re: LaCie disk on usb 2.0 [sun.com]

Summary: You first use prtconf -v to find out the USB vendor and product id of your device (equivalent of Linux' lsusb etc commands) and then append the following line to /kernel/drv/scsa2usb.conf (or /kernel/drv/usba10_scsa2usb.conf, depending on your kernel patch level):

attribute-override-list = "vid=0x781 pid=0x8888 rev=* subclass=ufi protocol=cb modesense=false reduced-cmd-support=true";

If you have more than one USB storage device, add a vid=... clause for each of them, separated by comma:

attribute-override-list = "vid=0x781 pid=0x8888 rev=* subclass=ufi protocol=cb modesense=false reduced-cmd-support=true", "vid=0x54c pid=0x10 rev=* subclass=ufi protocol=cb modesense=false reduced-cmd-support=true";

After addding this, I rebooted, and as soon as I plugged in the SanDisk Cruzer or my Sony camera, they were automatically mounted on /rmdisk/noname and /rmdisk/unnamed_rmdisk. Cool!